THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL
at Blackheath of 1717-18 is castellated and has a fortified-looking
round tower. He also introduced castellated structures into some of
the grounds which he furnished or laid out. His reason for doing so
was that mediaeval forms suggested strength, and he always wanted
to be masculine in his designs. Hence thick round towers and battle-
ments occur even in in his country houses which are otherwise in
the current style. However, it was not only their aesthetic qualities
which tempted him in mediaeval casdes. He saw more in them.
Not that he actually built sham ruins as the kter i8th century did,
but he defended the preservation of genuine ruins when he found
them, because they "move lively and pleasing reflections ... on
the persons who have inhabited them (and) on the remarkable
things which have been transacted in them", and because "with yews
and hollies in a wild thicket" they make "one of the most agreeable
objects that the best of landscape painters can invent".
Vanbrugh's austere version of medievalism found no successors,
but the two passages quoted from his memorandum of 1709 on
Blenheim form the foundation of Romantic Revivalism. As will
have been noticed Vanbrugh uses two arguments: the associational
and the picturesque. Both were developed by theorists of the i8th
century. A building is clothed in the garb of a special style, because
of the meditations which that style will rouse. And a building is
conceived in conjunction with the surrounding nature, because the
virtuosi had discovered on the Grand Tour amid the ruins of Roman
architecture in and around Rome, the truth and the picturesque-
ness of the heroic and idyllic landscapes-of Claude Lorraine, Poussin,
Dughet and Salvator Rosa. These were bought freely by English
collectors and helped to form the taste of artists and gardeners,
amateur and professional.
Lorraine may have been admired by Pope and Kent (who after
all was a painter before he became an architect), but the gardens of
Twickenham and Chiswick had nothing of the serene calm of a
Lorraine landscape. The Rococo had to die, before this kind of
beauty could be reproduced. The Leasowes, the garden which
William Shenstone the poet had laid out for himself about 1745,
was apparently amongst the first to replace the "twisting and
twirling" of the earlier style by a gentler flow of curves which,
together with the many memorial seats and temples which he
erected, helped to rouse feelings of pleasant meditation. The great
name in the history of mid-i8th-century gardening is Lancelot
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